Tourism's Impact (Susanne Hickey, Loess Hills Conservationist)

Susanne Hickey, Loess Hills Project Director for the Nature Conservancy, talks about how managing tourism and mining will lend themselves to the success of working landscapes.

Transcript: Tourism's Impact

Tourism can have a negative impact on a landscape. Especially here in the Loess Hills where the system is so fragile. If you have a lot of tourists that come into an area and want to go hiking and they use the same trail over and over again, you're going to have a negative impact. You might have trails developing that fragment the system. You might have exotic species that are going to come in along the trail -- on tourists boots for example. The other thing that happens, and I think this is something we need to be real aware of, where we're trying to promote the Loess Hills through people coming into the area and using the hills or viewing the hills just from a scenic perspective. As the tourists come through, they see the beauty. And a lot of those people then decide that they actually want to live here. And so they learn about how beautiful and unique the area is and they say I'd actually like to live out there. And so you have more people moving into the area as a result of tourists and that can have negative impacts. That puts a lot more pressure on the resource.